Why I Cloth Diaper

This post would probably be more appropriately named "Why I Cloth Diaper-D" since we're still on our cloth sabatacle, but I still feel like a cloth mama at heart!

The time of my life between the ages of 14 and 16 were without a doubt the most successful years of my prestigious and wildly success babysitting career, which spanned from the time I was 11 until I got my first "real job" in college (and even then it was really just a few rungs up on the ladder from babysitting). During that time I really loved putting myself in a situation where I got to imagine how I would run my own home someday when I was a mom. I'd cook them dinner, make a treat, play with them, watch a movie, put them to bed, clean up the kitchen, and all before the parents got home. I had no doubt in my mind that I'd be the most rockstar perfect mom/homemaker on the freaking planet (but that's a post for another day 😅)! I would often, as I was observing and setting these expectations in my head, make little mental notes of things I wanted to do in my future family, and things I did not want to do. I would also make mental notes on the type of woman I wanted to be, and that brings us to the three families I really felt connected to the most. We'll call them families A, B, and C.

Family A just felt like the picture perfect family to me. Everything they were, I wanted to be just like. Their kids loved me, they always had healthy homemade breads, and produce from their garden, and the parents seemed to have the perfect high school sweetheart love story (which was my DREAM at the time)! Aside from all of that, I also felt particularly close with the mom, and whenever she'd drop me off or pick me up we seemed to always have the best conversations. I should mention that I was a particularly old soul and that making friends with the adult women from my church was not all that uncommon for me... 😉

Family B was very special to me because the mom of family B wasn't all THAT much older than me and really felt like a surrogate older sister. Her kids were adorable and I was there to see a couple of them be born (not actually at the birth, but you know what I mean... 😆)! She and her husband also had the perfect love story in my opinion, and I felt such a kinship with the whole family - husband, wife, kids. They felt like my family, and I would often confide in the mom of family B things I was feeling or struggling with and seek advice like you would from a sister. I really looked up to them and, like family A, I wanted to be just like them.

Now on to family C. Family C was a little bit different because they were so different from any other family I had watched. The way they ran their home was different than I was used to and, though now I'm very familiar with all of these things, they had so many seemingly foreign tools that they used in their parenting like essential oils, nutritional supplements, natural house/baby products (such as natural soaps and diaper rash alternatives like coconut oil), and, you guessed it... Cloth diapers! I so admired family C not just because I felt so similar to and admired the mom and loved their kids, but because I had never seen anything like them before! I so admired their natural approach to parenting and decided then and there that I wanted to be just like them (sensing a pattern here?)

Now that I'm actually a mom, I can see where interacting with these three amazing families (all people I still love and admire very much) has impacted me greatly in my own mothering. No, I am not - as I hoped I would be - the super fused best version of all the people I admired... But I can see very clearly where the choices I make daily were shaped by the examples I saw as a teen babysitter, and that is where my love and fascination with cloth diapers began.

Aside from being super cute, cloth diapers are super ambiguous, and I really didn't LEARN about them until I actually became pregnant with Olivia. I remember sitting down with Taylor wondering how I was going to convince him to get on board with this and to my amazement he was surprisingly down with the idea! But I realized just how little I knew about them when he asked for more details... 

How do they work?

How much do they cost?

Is there one type or are there many?

How do you clean them?

Where do you get them?

I was embarrassed that I knew so little and was shocked when I did my first Google search on the subject and was slapped in the face by the sheer amount of contradicting and overwhelming information there was out there! But I was pregnant, I didn't have much else to do, and so I dove in head first and for months just learned, and learned, and learned all there was to learn. The more I learned the more excited I got, and the more excited I got the more passionate I became about it! Why weren't more people doing this?!?

I quickly learned that it's not everybody's cup of tea and quit my preaching.

But I didn't quit on my own plan!

I bought my stash, set my plan, and after a few rough weeks of trial and error once she was actually here, I fell into a beautiful routine with cloth diapering.

So let's get to the statement at the beginning of the post...why did I use cloth diapers and why do they continue to mean a lot to me?

Well... One reason was that I'm a little lazy, and I also hate spending money, so anything that kept me from having to go to the store to buy more diapers every other week was something I could get excited about!

On that same vein, we were poor college students and though building my stash was an investment upfront, it saved us so much money in the long haul!

I also felt so much pride in feeling like I was doing something worthwhile. I felt like I was doing something good for the earth, I felt like I was doing something good for our budget, and I felt like I was doing something good for my baby. Overall I just felt a lot of pride whenever I'd do a load of diaper laundry, knowing that was $30 bucks I had just saved my family and Lord knows how many years in a landfill I wasn't contributing to!

Another reason I loved using cloth diapers was because they were different! I was always getting asked about them (and every now and again I still do) by other curious moms and I loved being able to show people that they had other options and that cloth wasn't really as scary as a lot of people thought. My cloth diapers were always a great conversation starter (here's a little confession, I'd always pack my cutest diapers for when we'd leave the house so that people could see how cute they were, lol) and they honestly became a part of my mom-ing identity!

And who could forget this one...they're just down right adorable! There was something just so fun about getting to pick which diaper I wanted to use next...the pink one, the chevron one, the one with owls, or the one with elephants? It was just such a fun reward at the end of a stinky diaper to get to pick the next cute one to use. 

Overall, cloth diapering is something I'm super passionate about and miss truly deeply in my soul. If you've ever been curious about them, ask me about it! I have sooo much seemingly useless knowledge from my months and months of research... 😂

Who knows...maybe I'll do a series on here!